Tag Archives: godzilla

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.

The summer movie season means sequels galore, and we here at SportsAlcohol.com are happy to oblige with the latest installment of our own long-running series! Since 2014, we’ve been recording a podcast wherein we go through the top summer box office attractions of 20 years earlier and discuss what it was like going to movies in a different era, and how we feel about some of these beloved/despised/moneymaking/money-losing projects now. So, in the tradition of 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1994 comes our blockbuster episode on summer 1998, including:

Two asteroids!

Two big comedies!

One big comedy star trying drama!

More Disney song critiques!

Unsold Godzilla merchandise languishing at JC Penney!

A lightning round of non-blockbusters!

AND MORE!

For supplemental reading about the summer of 1998, you might also check out this site’s story “Godzilla ’98” and its companion piece “Armageddon ’98”!

We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

As you may have noticed, SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Nathaniel is a bit of an expert when it comes to all things Godzilla. If you’re in the NYC area, you get the chance to see him smash through the structures of Monster Island ignorance in person ONE WEEK FROM TODAY at Kevin Geeks Out About Kaiju. The event takes place at the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where you can have a warm peanut-butter-banana cookie with your monster mash. Official description:

The two-hour show features rare clips with everything from fan favorite kaiju to obscure creatures, with appearances by smog monsters, flying turtles, giant bird-beasts and more. With footage you won’t find on Netflix, Hulu or YouTube.

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.

After we voted on our definitive list of the 20 best movies of 2016, naturally we had to get together and talk about it. So Marisa, Sara, Jesse, and Nathaniel assembled on a winter evening to go over everything from The Neon Demon to La La Land; from the movies all four of us listed to the handful that got on the list with the support of just one; from the movies we loved to the movies we really fucking loved. Just like last year, it’s a wide-ranging yet quickly paced conversation that takes you through a year in film way better than any old Oscars ever could!

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We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.

If the Oscars can wait so long to unveil their best-of-the-year picks, why not us? After all, ours are demonstrably superior to the Academy’s: More eclectic, less predictable, sometimes more weird (often, also, more musical). 2016 wasn’t good for a lot, but it was, as it turned out, a good year for movies. So our core film group — Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Sara — went ahead and picked not 10, not 15, but 20. There was room; there could have been room for even more. We’ll be back with a podcast where we discuss our choices. For now, enjoy our tributes to the movies that moved us most in 2016.Continue reading The Top 20 Best Movies of 2016→

SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.

First things first: Shin Godzilla is here! There’s a new Japanese Godzilla film currently playing theaters in the United States and it is pretty spectacular. With a franchise that has lasted over six decades and twenty nine films, audience members will obviously approach it with a wide variety of expectations, so it’s best to know going in that it is a film much more in the vein of the original Godzilla (or 1984’s The Return of Godzilla) than the sillier alien invasion epics that characterized the 60s & 70s. It’s a film with seriousness of purpose, with the most frightening depiction of the title monster in the entire franchise (with the possible exception of the original). But it’s also a deeply eccentric film, with a strain of satire running throughout, and extremely propulsive and idiosyncratic filmmaking choices that render a talky, procedural story breathlessly involving (it’s the Contagion or Apollo 13 of Godzilla movies, or The Martian if Matt Damon was roughly 35 stories high and oozing radioactivity). The story is certainly familiar to fans of the genre, but the presentation can be dizzyingly unfamiliar. Presented in this country with subtitles, it’s an incredibly dense film, with whip fast dialogue (sure to be too talky to some) sometimes fighting for room with other onscreen text (including a running gag where every character with a line is identified by name and title/rank/governmental position, including some characters who get multiple titles as their position changes during the story). It’s a very political film, with some material that will be easily grasped by western audiences and some material that will (and, no doubt in my case, did) fly over their heads. Oh, and the monster sequences are beautiful, thrilling, and full of images that left this Godzilla fan’s jaw on the floor. So, that’s the short of it. Go see the movie! But there’s a lot more to talk about. So, if you want to go deeper, let’s get to it.

(NOTE: I’m going to talk about the story of the film in some detail below. But I’m only going to put another big spoiler warning before I discuss some details about the film’s depiction of Godzilla himself because there was some stuff there that genuinely surprised me!) Continue reading Shin Godzilla (2016)→

SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.

For one week, starting today, fans in America and Canada will be able to see Shin Godzilla, the first new Japanese Godzilla movie in twelve years. The film was a smash hit this summer in its native country, and is already proving controversial (mostly sight-unseen) with western fans for both its politics and its portrayal of the title monster. While controversy is certainly not new to the series, its existence surrounding the twenty-ninth(!) entry offers promise that there is still room to try something new as Godzilla enters his seventh decade on screen.

One area that Shin Godzilla seems to be striking new ground in the series is that it is apparently a completely fresh start, establishing its own continuity and not functioning as a sequel to any prior film. That’s right, Shin Godzilla is a reimagining/remake/hard reboot/what-have-you. It’s all the more surprising that his hasn’t happened before when you look and see that so many of the other storytelling trends that Hollywood studios have been chasing over the last fifteen years have been well covered in the Godzilla series. Godzilla wasn’t always there first, but he was usually there early, and I needn’t tell you how big those footprints are.Continue reading Godzilla: King of the Hollywood Trends→

SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.

SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.

Over sixty years and approximately 30 movies, Godzilla has ruled as King of the Monsters. There are now four films that have carried the title Godzilla (two Japanese and two American). Continue reading The Four ‘GODZILLA’s→

SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.

The word has trickled out that the new film is going to be the first film titled simply Godzilla that will feature the titular monster doing battle with some manner of other creature. So, this seems like a good time to talk about Godzilla’s classic opponents. Continue reading Godzilla Opponents→

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.

My friends and I did go to see the 1998 version of Godzilla three times in the theaters. This is a story about that although not what actually happened.

We graduate high school in four and a half weeks but first: Godzilla. On the balance, we’ve spent more time planning for Godzilla. Ivan explained it best: graduation is already set. Maybe some of the dumb kids have to sweat passing classes or getting credits, but the four of us have been cruising for months, or at least since I found out I wouldn’t fail gym for cutting most of the last quarter. We aren’t planning the ceremony, we don’t have to pick out clothes, people will tell us where to line up and where to sit, parents will plan the parties and order the macaroni salad and the cake with our pictures on it. But none of those parents or teachers or guidance counselors got us set up with Godzilla. We had to figure that out ourselves.

It started last summer when we saw the trailer where Godzilla’s foot came down and crushed a dinosaur skeleton in a museum, which was a clever way of saying fuck dinosaurs and fuck the movie you’re about to see which was The Lost World, which we still argue about on roughly forty percent of car rides: Henry and I pro, Chuck and Ivan more con.